I had to reach down for the bed to balance against when it hit me that I knew him, that I knew this trooper, that I’d always known him.
Not by the sunglasses, not by the build, and not by the Matador.
It was the thick black belt. It was the pearl-handled pistol cocked up out of that belt. There was a silver star set in that white handle. A Texas star.
He was the reason we’d driven halfway across the country in a single push, until we hit the ocean, couldn’t get any farther away.
I tried to swallow, couldn’t.
A week later Darren was home again, his boots kicked up onto the real coffee table.
We had a black-and-white werewolf movie turned up so loud it was shaking the walls of the trailer.
It was the funniest thing ever, like they all are, but we’d each get deadly quiet whenever the camera was running somebody down through the trees. When we were looking through the wolf’s eyes.
Darren was convinced that the director had to be a werewolf, to get this much right. To have cut this way around a tree, not that way.
By the end of the movie he’d drawn a thick blue pentagram onto his palm.
Because I knew how this went, I fell sideways from my end of the couch the instant he flicked an eye my way. I was already scrabbling for the kitchen but he caught me like always, licked his palm long and gross, and pressed that ink hard into my forehead, marking me.
“Now you’re like me,” he said in his movie werewolf voice.
“That’s not how it goes,” I told him, already trying to rub the star off. “They won’t let me in school if I have a tattoo . . .”
It was a lie, I was pretty sure, but he believed it, helped me wash it off, looking over his shoulder for Libby at each moment, even though she never came home only an hour after going in.
“You’re so brave,” I told him.
“Blow your scrawny ass down,” he said, and scrubbed harder.
An hour later, because the RV was still parked at the high school, we were back at the dollar store, prowling the aisles for hilarious stuff Darren could swallow.
I hated it.
“Bathroom,” I said, and peeled off.
Darren hardly noticed, was already carrying a string of Mardi Gras beads he planned on taking apart, swallowing one by one like an overdose.
Because I didn’t really need the bathroom, I just drifted through the toy aisles on the other side of the store, and watched Darren in the curved mirror. He was trying to read the safety warnings on a pack of watercolors, it looked like.
To look like I was shopping, I pulled a couple of O.K. Corral play sets from their long pegs, to better see the pegboard behind them. It was the same pattern and hole size as the pegboard behind the jars in the RV.
I traded the O.K. Corral for a pirate kit, and stopped at the plastic werewolf mask staring up at me, left the pirate stuff there.
Darren was waiting for me at the register.
“Anything?” he asked, looking at my hands for hilarious finds, and I shook my head no.
He had a rubber severed finger, was holding it in place of the finger he was missing.
“That’ll stop you up if you eat it,” I told him.
In the parking lot he bit it in half. It didn’t look as real anymore, with the grey foam showing instead of the finger bone, but not dying from the joke was an important part of the joke.
It was almost midnight when we got back to the trailer.
“You’ll tell me if she throws a fit?” he said, unbuttoning his shirt.
He’d already peed out front, standing on the chrome gas tank of his Peterbilt.
“It’ll be great,” I said, kneading the ground meat on the counter, making it mushier. “I think Wheel’s on,” I added, hooking my head to the living room.
He looked at me like I was crazy—on this late?—but still, he had to stand there, run through all the channels, pressing the button harder and harder like he could make Wheel roll up from the bottom of the screen.
It gave me just enough time to slide the second O.K. Corral kit from the front of my pants.
Werewolves can steal anything.
If a camera had been watching me at the dollar store, if someone in back had me on their little black-and-white screen—and you always have to assume they do—then what they would have seen was a tall fourteen-year-old delinquent peeling a costume kit or two up from a peg.
What their mind would correct that to, though, was just one kit. Because who needs two of the same, right? You have one face, you need one mask.
Then when I traded the kit they knew I had for the pirate one, the other was already slipping down the front of my pants, where, for a one-dollar item, it might not even be worth it to perform an inspection.
What I wanted was that silver star.
It was real tin, it looked like. Nearly foil it was so thin, sure, but not plastic anyway. Plastic would catch in Darren’s gut.
A badge, though.
It was for that Arkansas trooper’s widow, as I was now calling her. Darren’s secret admirer. Our wildlife biologist.
This time I just sat on the couch when Darren left.
He could have caught me, called me out on what I’d slipped into his next meal.
But not the wolf.
I flipped the channels, going deeper and deeper into the night, and finally stopped on one of the sequels of the movie we’d been watching earlier. It was what the station was calling a Full Moon Marathon. A long mournful howl led into each commercial, and then, after we’d been sold beer and tampons, words would spin up onto the screen in scary yellow, telling us to “bark at the moon,” all together now . . .
Libby would hate it.
I kicked my feet up onto the coffee table.
Soon, four or five days from now, a woman was going to follow her flashlight into a cemetery.
I could see her now, like through a camera.
She’s holding her mason jar tight to her chest, she’s on her knees now, she’s digging a hole, she’s patting the dirt over the jar and she’s telling her husband what happened to him, that she figured it out after all these years, that it’s all real. That there’s more out there in the night than his training ever could have prepared him for. And now she’s smoothing the dirt so the groundskeeper won’t notice, so he won’t dig this crumpled badge up. And now her hand, it’s still there, on her husband’s chest.
I settled in, turned the volume up.
CHAPTER 12
Year of the Wolf
Is that wolfsbane?” the hitchhiker says, pointing out the side window of his uncle’s tall truck.
“Buttercups again,” the hitchhiker’s aunt says, tired of this game.
She’s hitchhiking too, if it can count as hitchhiking when your car’s broke down, so you have to ride with your brother.
“It probably would make you sick, though,” the hitchhiker’s uncle says, shifting into a lower gear. “If there’s really butter in them, I mean.”
A few miles ago, because the hitchhiker’s almost ten, his uncle let him sit in his lap, steer the big wheel, even honk the horn three times. The hitchhiker’s fourth-grade teacher would never have let him do that. But Miss Carlin was still back in Alabama.
The hitchhiker’s aunt had written a note to her, explaining that the hitchhiker wasn’t absent so please don’t worry about him or report his absence, but then they hadn’t stopped by the school to deliver the note.
Because of trails, the hitchhiker’s aunt said. Because of bread crumbs. Because their rent being double-late had happened on the exact same day as their Monte Carlo died. It was a sign. It meant they were moving again. Werewolves can read nature like that, the hitchhiker’s uncle explained. It’s because of their heightened senses. Because of their big ears, their big eyes.
Three hours ago they’d crossed into Mississippi.
“It safe here?” the hitchhiker’s aunt says, pulling the hitchhiker closer to her. It’s all billboards and pastures so far
.
The hitchhiker’s uncle leans over the steering wheel with his whole body. “Wolfsbane only grows in movies,” he says instead of a real answer. Then, special to the hitchhiker, “Want to know the real poison for werewolves?”
The hitchhiker’s aunt looks over too.
“Mustard,” the uncle says, having to whisper it because it’s so deadly.
The hitchhiker tries to imagine it, having to eat mustard. It makes him laugh and gross out at the same time.
“Don’t listen to him,” the aunt says, close to the hitchhiker’s ear. “Mustard’s good.”
He doesn’t believe her. He’ll always hate mustard, he promises himself.
“So where is this place?” the hitchhiker’s aunt says.
“Right up here,” the hitchhiker’s uncle says.
Soon enough they’re downshifting, taking the ramp.
The last meal was ten hours ago.
Where the hitchhiker’s uncle is taking them is a grown-over peach orchard he heard about. Not for the peaches, but for the fat deer that come to eat the peaches.
This is a hunt.
“It’s going to be perfect,” the uncle says, leaning even more over the wheel, to see the turnoff. “Private property, nobody knows about it, way out in nowhere. It’s a good start. It’s going to be a good year. The best year.”
His big truck rattles slow over one cattleguard then another. There’s five sets of rattles because that’s how many axles the truck has. The hitchhiker keeps count, making sure the whole trailer is still with them. By the time the road goes to dirt, the uncle has to turn the headlights on, downshift even lower, breathe only through his nose.
“How are you going to turn back around?” the hitchhiker’s aunt says.
“I haven’t had deer for, for—” the uncle says, and a line of on-purpose drool goes from the corner of his mouth.
“What if it has mustard on it?” the hitchhiker says, halfway hiding in his aunt’s lap, because he knows what his uncle will do, here. It’s part of the game he knows he’s too old for but can’t resist: the uncle whipping his head over, his eyes hot, his hand pulling long on the horn, his mouth moving like he’s screaming about this mustard on his deer.
The horn is really three horns, all tied into one. Illegal in ninety-nine countries, the hitchhiker’s uncle keeps saying. The only horn hearable from the moon.
“There?” the hitchhiker’s aunt says, pointing out the left side of the truck.
“Ahh,” the hitchhiker’s uncle says.
Rows of evenly spaced trees going off into the distance. Like soldiers standing guard.
“X marks the spot,” the hitchhiker’s uncle says, and when the hitchhiker leans up to see what his uncle’s talking about, the uncle pulls his wet finger from his mouth and draws an X of spit on the hitchhiker’s forehead.
“You’re gross,” the hitchhiker’s aunt says.
“I’m not the one with spit on my head, am I?” the uncle says, rolling out his side of the truck before the hitchhiker can get him back.
They leave the truck idling, the running lights on.
The hitchhiker runs across between the cab and the trailer, high-stepping over the air hoses. The aunt ducks under the trailer, holding her hair up so it won’t get fluff in it from the weeds.
It’s nearly full dark.
The hitchhiker’s uncle is smelling the wind.
“Where are they?” he says, opening and closing his hand like some ancient werewolf trick to bring the deer in.
“Maybe this is the wrong one,” the hitchhiker’s aunt says. “Aren’t peach trees all curvy?”
“How many orchards can there be on one road?” the hitchhiker’s uncle says.
The hitchhiker steps into the tall grass and weeds then jumps back when something gold and scaly scampers away, making the worst snuffling noise in the world.
“Think we can eat those?” the hitchhiker’s uncle says. “A world of buzzards can’t be wrong, can they?”
“We’re not scavengers,” the hitchhiker’s aunt says, stepping out there too. For the trees. “This isn’t peaches. It’s that—it’s that nut,” she says, when she gets to the first one. “Pecan, right?”
The hitchhiker’s uncle reaches up to a branch, shakes it. Black husks rain down all around them. Clusters of the pecans.
The hitchhiker’s aunt and uncle look at each other about this.
“They are food,” the uncle says, squatting to pick a pecan husk up, look at it from every side. “Sort of.” He pulls the pecan out. Its looks like a giant wooden seed.
“We had them at school once,” the hitchhiker says.
“That was walnuts,” his aunt says.
“They’re not the same thing?” the uncle says.
When he cracks the pecan open in his fist it’s like a gunshot.
Inside, the meat is wood-colored too. He holds it across to the hitchhiker’s aunt.
She brushes imaginary dirt from it, pops one of the halves into her mouth.
After chewing for a few seconds, she nods.
The hitchhiker’s uncle eats one, eats two, then smiles. Now it’s a pecan massacre. The hitchhiker and his aunt hold the uncle’s shirt between them like a blanket and his uncle shakes the big limbs of the trees until the shirt’s almost too heavy to hold. When there’s enough for a meal—for ten meals—the aunt and uncle dive in. Because the hitchhiker only likes to eat perfect halves, not the ones that break, he only gets to eat one out of every five or so that he manages to open. And because his hands aren’t grown-up yet, he can’t open them nearly as fast as his aunt and uncle. And then, when his uncle finds a wasp nest, it doesn’t matter because the uncle’s chasing them through the trees, finally getting bit on the neck and shoulder.
The hitchhiker is eating the sixth pecan of his life, the wasps all gone back to sleep, when he hears a sound not like eating.
It’s his uncle, the dry crumbs of his thirtieth or fortieth pecan oozing from his mouth like chunky sawdust.
“What?” the hitchhiker’s aunt says to him, and then the hitchhiker’s uncle is falling to his knees, and then he’s holding his stomach. Then he’s lying on his side groaning, his shoulders shaking.
The hitchhiker’s aunt feels her way over to him, holding her hand out for the hitchhiker to stay where he is.
Before she can say anything, it hits her too.
The pecans.
They ate too many, too fast.
The hitchhiker drops the one he was trying to open and stands into the dusk, both his aunt and his uncle lying on the ground pedaling their legs slow, their faces twisted up, eyes muddy with crying.
Already, because it’s the natural thing to do, the uncle is shifting. To protect himself.
“Run,” the hitchhiker’s aunt says, shooshing him away, and by the time she says it her mouth is thick with her new teeth, her eyes are cloudy, between colors.
The hitchhiker falls back into the grass and then falls all the way to the truck, climbs in and pulls the door shut, cranks the window up fast.
Sitting on the middle now, on what his uncle calls the doghouse, there’s the CB.
The hitchhiker takes it down, looping the spirally cable around his wrist like his uncle does. Then, still doing like he’s been taught, he opens his mouth a second before he’s pulled the mic all the way to his lips. It makes it feel like he’s got the words ready—his uncle’s words, his uncle’s trucker handle.
“Breaker, breaker,” the hitchhiker says again. “This is Wolf Man in the Sky, howling down at you from—from . . .”
His uncle always told him that part.
“What’s your twenty again, Wolfie?” a voice comes back.
“They’re dying,” the hitchhiker says, and hates the way his voice is crying.
“Where are you, son?” a different voice asks, and the hitchhiker looks all around, at the rows of trees, the broken fence, the windmill.
“It’s not—not mustard,” he says, and then tries to turn their v
oices up, loses them all.
When a dark, long-legged shape steps into the glow of the running lights in front of the truck, the hitchhiker reaches up for the horn-string.
It’s a deer and her baby.
They’ve gotten used to the rumbling truck, are just doing what they do. Maybe this is the right road, the right orchard.
Now the momma deer’s looking up at the windshield.
Finally she twitches her tail twice like whisking away her concern. She steps past the bumper, isn’t even all the way out of the road when she’s jerked into the darkness like it’s a giant mouth.
The hitchhiker crawls up the back of the driver’s seat, and, because he wants to get higher, get away, he pulls himself up by his hands as well, not paying attention to what he’s grabbing on to for purchase.
The horn-string, as it turns out. The horn blasts out loud and long, because if the hitchhiker lets go, he’ll fall before he’s situated.
The sound, just like his uncle says, slams up to the moon and back, and somewhere in that long loud loop, it heart-attacks the baby deer, who’s never heard the world crack open like this. The hitchhiker’s uncle is always saying how deer and rabbits are really the same animal, that what goes for one goes for the other. They’re sensitive to the heat. They like to run and watch, run and watch. Their hearts will stop on a dime, from the slightest thing.
It must all be true.
The baby deer folds down onto its front legs, then lays the rest of itself down.
At which point a dark, lanky shape steps out into the dull orange glow of the running lights.
The hitchhiker’s aunt looks up to the windshield as well. She lowers her nose to the baby deer’s nose, to be sure. And then she lowers herself down to eat, starting with the thin white skin at the belly.
The hitchhiker locks one door, then the other.
For the rest of the night, then, the truck trembling below him, he sits on the doghouse with his knees under his chin and sucks ketchup packets. In the morning there will be two naked people curled up out there in the tall yellow grass, sleeping.
He hopes.
Mongrels Page 16